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There are different things you might mean, and the answer will depend on which ones you do mean. Since I'm particularly unsure what you mean by "importance," I'm going to look at a nearby question: is there any reason to think that happiness is a good thing? That raises the question of what counts as happiness, and without trying to give anything like a full-blown theory, I suggest thinking of happiness as human thriving. And without giving a precise definition of "thriving," we can come at it this way: imagine someone who has the usual daily ups and downs, but is engaged, resilient, productive, with a normal range of healthy emotions, who can take pleasure in things worth taking pleasure in, etc. etc. etc.

Is this a good thing? It's hard to see what possible reason there could be for thinking it's not. Imagine two villages. In one, most people are thriving; in the other, more or less no one is. Which would you rather live in? Which is a better model for what we'd like other places to be like? For most of us, the answer will be clear. Happiness in this sense seems to be a good, and indeed an important good. Happiness in this sense seems to be of considerable importance. It's the kind of thing we'd like the world to have more of.

Maybe there's some cosmic perspective from which happiness, that is, thriving, doesn't matter—maybe because from that perspective nothing matters. But if so, why invest that perspective with the final say? Why should it matter to us that nothing matters from that point of view?

If a reason is what you're after, it's clear that in one sense I haven't given you one. I haven't given you an argument; I've tried to provoke a way of seeing things. When it comes to matters of what's good, my own sense is that at some stage, it will come down to that. But we can say a little more. If on reflection, informed, thoughtful people tend to agree that something is good, it's not clear what other other sort of evidence we could have. The word "informed" is important here; I might think something is good without understanding its real consequences. But it's not clear what we'd even mean by saying that something could pass this test and yet not really be good.

We could add that even though happiness as we've described it seems to be important, setting it as the goal you work for directly may be a bad way to achieve it. Better, perhaps, not to strive for happiness but rather to pursue the kinds of more concrete goals that make up the bulk of a thriving life. But put that all together and you've got happiness. May there be much more of it!

Perhaps these people think there's something else we should be paying attention to, to the exclusion of all else. What? Even if what it is is a Very Good Thing, there are lots of good things, and if we ignore all the others, the world will be the poorer for it.

Maybe they think no one should pursue purely personal interests. But all else aside, if you don't take time for yourself, there's a real chance that you'll be less good at contributing to whatever common good is at stake.

Or is the claim that nothing matters? If so, it doesn't matter that you're doing whatever you're doing; if nothing matters, nothing matters.

In any case, it's pretty plausible that art, music, friendship, play, and countless other things do matter in their varied ways. At least, it's more plausible than hifalutin arguments to the contrary.

So my advice is: don't be bullied by the scolds. The best response (if not the best revenge) is to live well, and that includes making room for the passions that the scolds want to take away from you. Nod, smile, and get on with living.

If "delusional knowledge" is supposed to mean that what the person "knows" isn't true, then the usual answer (with which I would agree) is no. We can't know what isn't so.

If "delusional knowledge" means beliefs produced by the person's delusion, but that happen by luck to be true, the answer is no according to most philosophers. The problem is that even though the belief is true, it isn't connected to the facts in the right way. To put it a bit too simply, the fact that what the person believes is true doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they believe it; they would believe it even if it were false.

If the question is whether a person who suffers from delusions can know some things, the answer is yes. A deluded person might know her own name; he might know where he lives; she might know that hydrogen is the first element in the periodic table. But due to his delusions, he might believe that astral beings are whispering the secrets of the universe in his ear. That's not knowledge.

There may be other possibilities, but you get the idea. First, say more clearly what you mean by "delusional knowledge." Then ask if it covers cases where the person holds a true belief that has a reasonable justification or a reliable connection to the facts. If so, it will probably count as knowledge. If not, it probably won't.

Interesting question. Some philosophers have attributed to abstract objects divine attributes like being eternal and timeless. Perhaps some abstract objects (like the properties of justice and beauty) might be worthy of worship. I have actually argued that abstract objects do have causal roles, so I am sympathetic with your inquiry! Their causal role (in my view) takes place in accounting for our intentionality and thinking. When you think about 1+1, the reason why you reason that 1+1=2 is that you grasp necessary relationships between numbers, which are abstract objects. Moreover, for some of us who think God exists non contingently, we suppose that there is the abstract state of affairs of there being a non contingent, necessarily existing God. And no less a philosopher than Plato suggests that the Good might be the source of what is.

However while abstract objects might have some causal powers, few have thought they can have intentional powers (e.g. the property of justice as an abstract object cannot itself act justly or be loving or know things or hear prayers or care about the world....) This limitation would mean that one or more abstract objects would not be able to function / act as God is thought to do so in most theistic traditions.

Be that as it may, a contemporary, brilliant philosopher, Victoria Harrison, has recently argued for comparing God to an abstract object (she did so last summer at a philosophy conference in Brazil). You might do a search for her work on this topic.

Great question. It might be made even more vexing if we compare the sound of wind with a musical piece in which musicians play instrumental music that resembles almost exactly the sound of wind. The chief reason why most of us would distinguish the two is because it is long held that works of art are artifactual: things (events or sounds) that are produced intentionally. The term "art" actually comes from the word "ars" which refers to the technique (techne) that is used to produce something. So, for most of history and today, the term "art" is short for "work of art" and because the sound of wind is (typically) not an intentionally produced to be a work (of art), the two are different.

Still, we can imagine someone recording the sound of wind and then using this in an overall musical production. We can also imagine musical compositions intended only to be performed on windy day or during extreme weather conditions in which there is thunder and lightning. In such ways, artists might attune their work to incorporate a variety of environmental factors.

Philosophers will divide over the question whether tastes, colours, sounds, smells and so on are by nature physical or phenomenal. If these so-called "secondary qualities" are physical, then it makes sense to think of one smell covering up another, which is still there and reappears when the smell covering it up is removed. Similarly, if you think of colour as a physical entity, or you thinkbof it as rather like paint , you can think of one "colour" covering another up, so that the top layer of "colour" could be peeled off to reveal the older underlying colour. But if you think of the qualities as inherently perceptual, then one colour or sound or smell is not covered up by another; it is replaced by it. As Plato puts it in the Phaedo, 'in such a situation it either withdraws or ceases to exist.' My own preference is for a theory in which the "secondary qualities" like tastes are not inherently physical. It makes no sense to think of a physical blue, say, that lacks the quality blue. But good arguments can be advanced for both views.

Given a particular conclusion, we can, normally, trace it back to the very basic premises that constitute it.

I doubt we can do that without seeing the conclusion in the context of the actual premises used to derive it. The conclusion Socrates is mortal follows from the premises All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, but it also follows from the premises All primates are mortal and Socrates is a primate. So which pair of premises are "the very basic premises" for that conclusion? Outside of the actual argument context, the question has no answer.

I don't know what you mean by "the root of a conclusion," but you seem to be suggesting that any knowledge is impure if it depends on -- or if it was acquired using -- any reasoning at all. Perhaps the term inferential would be a better label for such knowledge. On this view, even if I have direct knowledge that I am in pain (when I am), I have only inferential knowledge that Some Anglophone is in pain if I derive the latter proposition from the former by way of the premise I am an Anglophone.

Your final sentence suggests that reason is like a prism that distorts any image seen through it. I don't see reason as a distorting influence on knowledge but, instead, as an essential tool for acquiring all of the inferential knowledge that we have. It's true that bad reasoning can take you from premises you know to a conclusion that you fail to know, but bad reasoning is the fault of the reasoner, not the fault of reason.

Given a particular conclusion, we can, normally, trace it back to the very basic premises that constitute it.

I doubt we can do that without seeing the conclusion in the context of the actual premises used to derive it. The conclusion Socrates is mortal follows from the premises All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, but it also follows from the premises All primates are mortal and Socrates is a primate. So which pair of premises are "the very basic premises" for that conclusion? Outside of the actual argument context, the question has no answer.

I don't know what you mean by "the root of a conclusion," but you seem to be suggesting that any knowledge is impure if it depends on -- or if it was acquired using -- any reasoning at all. Perhaps the term inferential would be a better label for such knowledge. On this view, even if I have direct knowledge that I am in pain (when I am), I have only inferential knowledge that Some Anglophone is in pain if I derive the latter proposition from the former by way of the premise I am an Anglophone.

Your final sentence suggests that reason is like a prism that distorts any image seen through it. I don't see reason as a distorting influence on knowledge but, instead, as an essential tool for acquiring all of the inferential knowledge that we have. It's true that bad reasoning can take you from premises you know to a conclusion that you fail to know, but bad reasoning is the fault of the reasoner, not the fault of reason.

No; truth doesn't require certainty. Whether something is true is a matter of how things are, whether anyone is certain about it or even aware of it. For example: I have a file cabinet in my office with some papers in it. No one (certainly not me) is certain exactly how many pieces of paper are in the cabinet, though there's a truth of the matter. The truth is determined simply by what's in the cabinet, whether anyone knows or bothers to check.

In the case of my file cabinet, it's at least possible to find out how many pieces of paper are in it, and so someone might suggest modifying the view you're asking about. Perhaps there's a truth about a matter only if it's at least possible for someone to become certain of it. And indeed, people have defended views like that. They go under the umbrella of verificationism. There are even some cases where something like verificationism is plausible. For example: we don't believe there's such a thing as absolute uniform (inertial) motion because our physics tells us that even in principle we couldn't detect it. On the other hand, it's hard to see how anyone could ever be certain of exactly how many dinosaurs were alive on earth exactly 100 million years before midnite, New Years 2018, GMT. Nonetheless, the fact that we have no way of being certain doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether or not there's a truth of the matter. In the case of absolute motion, questions of verifiability shade over into questions of what we would even mean by "absolute inertial motion." For the dinosaurs, the fact that there's no way for us to be certain of the number doesn't seem to have anything to do with meaning.

Here's a quicker way to the point: you agree that knowledge doesn't require certainty. But if we can know things we're not certain of, then there are truths we can know without being certain. That's a way of getting to the same place from a premise you've already granted.

The rough answer is that the authors of dictionaries do it the same way the rest of us do. When you run up against a word that's not in the dictionary, sometimes you can tell what it means from context, and sometimes you find out by asking other people. In fact, for most of human history, these were the usual ways of learning the meanings of words. How this works in detail is a deep and interesting question, but whatever the answer, it clearly does work and so there's no special problem for compilers of dictionaries.

Here's an illustration adapted from https://bestlifeonline.com/new-words-2017/. If someone said "Just ping me when you've made a decision," you might need to do a bit of guessing or asking, but it wouldn't take too much work to figure out what they mean: "Get in touch with me by text or email or on Facebook messenger or..." Lexicographers have more systematic and refined methods for deciding what people use a word to mean, but they don't do something radically different from what ordinary speakers do.

We can add that words don't get into the dictionary until they reach the point of being widely used. Sometimes the question isn't so much what people mean by the word (though the dictionary will duly note that) but deciding whether the word has taken root deeply enough to count as part of the language.